Burned

She pointed to the wall, the wall to their parents’ bedroom. She wasn’t crying, she merely kept saying:

He’s dead.

He remembers knocking on the door, even though it was ajar. The door to his parents’ bedroom was always closed. Now it swung open. His father lay there with his hands on the duvet. His eyes were shut. He looked at peace. His mother was still asleep. Henning went over to his father’s side of the bed and looked at him. He looked like he was sleeping. When Henning shook him, he didn’t move. Henning shook him again, harder this time.

His mother woke up. At first, she was startled, wondering what on earth Henning was up to. Then she looked at her husband — and screamed.

Henning doesn’t remember much of what happened next. He only recalls the smell of oil. Even in death, Jakob Juul smelled of oil.

*

After a breakfast consisting of two cups of coffee with three sugars, Henning decides to go to work. It is only 5.30 a.m., but he thinks there is no point in hanging around the flat.

He visualises the sea as he turns into Urtegata. He should be feeling tired, but the coffee has woken him up. Solvi isn’t there yet, but he visualises her, too, as he swipes his card.

There is only one other person in the office when he arrives. The night duty editor is hunched over his keyboard, sipping a cup of coffee. Henning nods briefly to him as they make eye contact, but the duty editor soon returns to his screen.

Henning lets himself sink into his squeaking chair. He catches himself wondering when Iver Gundersen gets to work, if he is post-coital and glowing, if it’s plain for all to see that Nora gave him a good start to the day.

By the time Henning snaps out of his self-flagellating fantasy, he could have sworn he could detect Nora’s scent. A hint of coconut against warm skin. He doesn’t recall the name of the lotion, the one she loved and which he loved that she wore. But he can smell coconut all around him. He turns, gets halfway up from his chair and looks around. The duty editor and he are the only two people there. And yet he can smell coconut. Sniff, sniff. Why can’t he recall the name of that lotion?

The scent disappears as quickly as it came. He falls back into his chair.

The sea, Henning, he tells himself. Focus on the sea.

Chapter 22

Research is a fine word. It’s even a profession. A researcher. Every TV series has one. Every TV news desk has one, sometimes many.

Henning spends his time doing a little research while the rest of the newspaper wakes up. Research matters, it is possibly a journalist’s most important task when there isn’t much else to do. Dig, dig dig. The oddest but ultimately crucial snippets of information can be found in the strangest texts or public records.

He remembers a story he worked on years ago. He was relatively inexperienced at the time, probably hadn’t covered more than ten murders when a vicar, Olav Jorstad disappeared in the sea, off the coast of Sorland. Everyone knew how much Jorstad liked fishing, but he was familiar with the sea and would never have gone out if bad weather had been forecast.

Eventually, his boat was found, bottom up. Jorstad himself was never found and everything pointed to a tragic accident. The current had very likely carried his body out into the wide, blue sea.

Henning covered the story for Aftenposten, and put together a standard package, which meant interviewing family, neighbours, friends, Jorstad’s congregation, the whole Norwegian Bible belt, practically. After discussing the story with his editor, Henning decided to stay on because he had a hunch that something was missing from the picture of Jorstad that everyone was painting. In the eyes of his parishioners, Jorstad was an outstanding vicar, a brilliant spiritual leader, who had the gift of the gab; some even claimed that he had healed them, but Henning never reported such claims in his articles. He suspected some of them of actively courting publicity.

However, Jorstad’s role as a choir master and conductor received very little attention. Every church has a choir. Vicars are trained in choral song. The Reverend Mr Jorstad was a man who liked discipline and consequently, it was a fine choir. Some days after Jorstad’s disappearance, after the media novelty had faded, Henning was chatting to Jorstad’s son, Lukas. They happened to talk about the choir and Henning asked if Lukas had been a member. Lukas replied no.

A few weeks later, Henning was trying to contact a member of the choir, a woman called Susanne Opseth, who was supposedly one of the last people to see Jorstad alive. Henning did his research and found several newspaper cuttings in which she was featured. And in one of them, from the early 1990s, before the Internet, he spotted her in a photo, singing in the choir with Mr Jorstad conducting. What Henning didn’t notice at first, but discovered when he examined the picture in detail, was that Lukas was lined up in the back row.